What is Voice Dialogue?

Voice Dialogue is a method for connecting with, learning about and integrating our various selves, also known as inner selves and energy patterns, and include archetypes.

Our selves make up who we are. We have primary selves (which together form our ego) and disowned selves (our shadow). Our selves hold our conscious and sub-conscious thoughts, beliefs and feelings.

How our selves are configured in us determines how we experience our lives.

How Your Personality Works

You know how the petals of a rose are hidden before it blooms? With only a few visible on the outside?

You, too, have only a few selves visible on the surface, with many more hidden underneath, all protecting your core.

The Outgoing Self

That part of yourself you feel is you, that holds your rules, values and much of your personal history, is your primary self (it’s usually made up of a few selves).

This primary self developed in your childhood to protect you and enable your survival. It is who you have come to identify as. (You might call it your ego or your personality.)

This primary self does an amazing job (you’re alive!) but it is limited by its nature. By its perceptions, abilities, energy type, rules and values. And so therefore you’re limited by its nature.

The Lazy Self

Examples of Primary Selves

For instance, you might have developed a highly Responsible primary self, because that’s what worked for you in your family system. Your responsible self probably works together with your Pusher and Inner Critic to keep you in line. So now as an adult you are likely someone who others can depend on. But you probably also find it difficult to let go, be spontaneous and have fun.

Or if you developed a strong Rational Mind as a primary self, then you may find it challenging to express and understand feelings (your own and other people’s).

Or if you became a Pleaser, then you probably find it impossible to feel entitled to take for yourself and have your own needs met.

(I’ve included outlines of 44 different selves in my book Which Self Are You?)

The Perfectionist

Disowned Selves

All the selves you accept and include in the package that’s ‘you’ are your primary selves.

Other selves and energies are relegated to your shadow where you judge them or have little or no awareness of them. Those are your disowned selves.

The Spiritual Self

How your selves – both primary and disowned – are ‘configured’ in you will determine how you think, feel and act.

Freedom and Choice

Each self holds particular memories and has a narrative about your life, based on its experience of it. Each self has preferences for how you lead your life. Each self also has anxieties and concerns. 

So when you make choices, what you decide depends on who in you is involved.

This has massive implications for how your life and relationships play out.

If you’d like to have more choice in how you experience life, then becoming aware of and integrating your selves is key. 

Voice Dialogue and Personal Transformation

When you do Voice Dialogue you experience a transformation of consciousness.

You change from being over-identified with your primary self or selves (and their particular way of being in the world) to being able to access and integrate other parts of your psyche (along with their perspectives, perceptions, abilities and energy).

This process both enriches and frees you. It enables you to experience life with more awareness, acceptance, choice and fulfilment.

Here’s more information about the benefits of Voice Dialogue.

Voice Dialogue and Relationship

Voice Dialogue involves learning how our selves bond with the selves in other people in predictable (but unconscious) patterns.

Understanding these ‘bonding patterns’ is a game-changer for understanding relationships.

Voice Dialogue also includes working with the energetic nature of our selves and learning to use energy more consciously in our relationships.

Who Created Voice Dialogue?

Voice Dialogue’s creators are Dr Hal Stone and Dr Sidra Stone. They first developed the Psychology of Selves in the early 1970s. The work is known fully as Voice Dialogue, Relationship and the Psychology of Selves (or alternatively the Psychology of the Aware Ego).

How You Can Use Voice Dialogue in Your Daily Life

Download my FREE ebook Which Inner Self is Running Your Life? for an example of how you can use Voice Dialogue to help you in an everyday situation.

It also gives you an overview of 20 selves, and a simple exercise to discover your own primary and disowned selves.

“We consider Astra Niedra to be an outstanding teacher, trainer and facilitator of the Voice Dialogue process …”Hal Stone PhD and Sidra Stone PhD, Founders of Voice Dialogue

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